Daksh Kumar

Samsung Galaxy J2

Mobile telephone. Samsung, 2015

His first phone, which he got when he was still very young. He loved it, and spent most of his time on it playing games.

HP 14

Laptop computer. Hewlett-Packard

He talked his parents into buying it for him at 12, and still calls it the best decision of his life. Design, coding, video editing and his first freelance work all started on this machine. None of it would have happened without it.

Quantum Computing

Model of a quantum computer

He used to hate chemistry, yet quantum computers are one of his favourite things to read about. He has always been drawn to complex, futuristic technology, and loves the physics of how these machines actually work.

Brain and Neurons

Anatomical model

He loves reading about psychology and how the human mind works. Right now he is most interested in how AI is changing our brains, from the way we think down to the level of neurons.

Cinema

Film camera

He has loved cinema since he was a child, all of it, from brain rot videos to Oscar winning films. What he loves most is how three hours in front of a screen can take you out of your own life for a while.

Claude

Language model. Anthropic

The AI tool he uses most, and has since shortly after it was released.

The Flight Over

Photograph. On the way to the United Kingdom

Daksh on his flight to the UK. He made the journey alone, leaving a small town in Sindh, Pakistan, for a country where he knew nobody. Most of what is in this museum came after this flight.

Where It Started

Photograph. Childhood, at home

Daksh as a boy, in sunglasses a size too big. He was never a good student. He was a back bencher who could barely pass his exams, and his parents, teachers and friends all made fun of him for it. To most people he looked like a loser. He never believed them. Deep down he was sure he was special and that he would make it big, and he still believes it.

Hackathons and London

Photograph. Where he goes to learn

He lives in Egham, but whenever he is free and spots an event worth going to, he heads into London for a hackathon or tech meetup. He loves meeting new people who think better than he does, and he always comes back having learned something from them.

The Society

Photograph. President, International Society, Royal Holloway

He is president of the International Society at Royal Holloway, and it is his favourite thing he does. He runs it like a startup, with new kinds of events, an Apple Wallet membership card, partnerships with local businesses and events people keep coming back to.

About Me

AI Engineer in Training at Royal Holloway

I'm a final year computer science student at Royal Holloway, focused on AI. Most of my time goes into RAG systems, agent engineering and fine-tuning models. I came to the UK on my own from a small town. I'm good with people, and probably better at SQL than I need to be.

How I Got Here

The short version

I first used a computer at 6 and got my own laptop at 12. I started editing videos at 13 and was freelancing by 15, the same year I started coding. The feeling has stayed the same ever since. One small line does something, and then it grows into a whole system built from what is basically plain English.

1. I flew to the UK alone from a small town in Pakistan, without knowing a single person here. That has been my pattern ever since. Do the thing that scares you, and learn from whatever breaks.

What I Build

Currently looking for roles in AI engineering, machine learning engineering or AI software engineering.

I've done a lot since then, from design and bartending to social media and student ambassador work. What I love most is building tools that fix a problem I've had myself or seen someone close to me struggle with. Sakha, a voice first AI companion built on the Bhagavad Gita, and Threshold, a visa sponsorship job matcher for international students, both started that way.

1. I started using AI chatbots the day they launched and kept going deeper, into machine learning and how models behave. It has become the thing I care about most, and it led me to research on estimating exoplanet orbits with ML.

The Crossing

Sindh to the United Kingdom

At seventeen he flew to the UK alone from a small town in Sindh, Pakistan, without knowing anyone there. He has followed the same rule since. Do the thing that scares you, and learn from whatever breaks.

Off the Clock

Practice and pastime

He meditates every day and journals every night. Away from code he works behind a bar, runs the International Society as president and does student ambassador and hall life work. The rest of his time goes on films and whatever music he is into that week.

Education

Royal Holloway and City School and College

1. BSc Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Jan 2025 to Jun 2027. 69.5% in second year. Predicted First Class.
2. City School and College, Pano Aqil, Pakistan, 2011 to 2024.

Awards and Certificates

Competitions, coding practice and a job simulation

1. Runner up, Maths District Olympiad, 2024
2. 150 LeetCode questions solved
3. 50 Project Euler problems solved
4. Deloitte Australia, Technology Job Simulation (Forage), issued Sep 2026.

President

International Society, Royal Holloway · Part time · May 2026 to present

1. Launched a digital membership system with Apple Wallet cards, giving members discounts at local stores and guaranteed interviews with partner job agencies.
2. Run the society like a startup, with events nobody on campus had done before, including the Night of Nations, a Cultural Fashion Show and a go karting Rush Rally, many run with the International Community and other cultural societies.
3. Lead a committee of 10 and coordinate the society's day to day running.

Founding Product Engineer

NextRound · Part time · Oct 2026 to present

1. Joined as one of the first engineers at an early stage startup building evidence based hiring, which helps companies judge candidates on what they can actually do. I work directly with the CEO on the core product.
2. Improving the NextRound portal and the candidate assessment experience, using feedback from early users to decide what to fix and build first.
3. Run the platform locally to test changes properly before anything goes live.
4. Help shape the product roadmap and think through how the platform should grow as we take on more clients.

Research Assistant

Royal Holloway · Internship · May 2026 to Aug 2026

1. Co-authored research applying conformal prediction to estimating exoplanet orbits from radial velocity data. It reached 100% coverage against a 90% target on 34 held out real stars, with no empty intervals.
2. Designed and built the synthetic data pipeline, simulating planet signals from Kepler's equations and adding real noise taken from NASA telescope observations.
3. Implemented likelihood ratio reweighting (Tibshirani et al., 2019) so intervals calibrated only on synthetic data still hold on real, unseen observations.

Host

Insanity Radio 103.2FM · Part time · Oct 2026 to present

1. Host Artificial Insanity, a live weekly show on Insanity Radio 103.2FM, Royal Holloway's student and community station. It goes out every Monday from 11am to 12pm.
2. The show is for people who think AI has nothing to do with them. It looks at how AI already shapes everyday life, from bills, jobs and water to education and even the way we think, in plain English with no tech background needed.
3. Invite Royal Holloway academics and people working in industry as guests to share their perspective on where AI is heading.
4. Some episodes also cover careers, student life and the everyday challenges international students face.
5. Came in with no radio experience and took this on to push myself, get better at speaking live, and have honest conversations with interesting people.

Marketing Coordinator

Palmy · Internship · Aug 2025 to Oct 2025

1. Edited full podcast episodes in Premiere Pro and made trailers and short clips for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
2. Set up SEO across platforms, including titles, descriptions, tags and thumbnails, so the content was easier to find.
3. Designed branding and thumbnail visuals in Photoshop, building a consistent look across all distributed content.

Video Editor

Freelance · From age fifteen

1. Began editing at thirteen and was freelancing by fifteen.

Student Ambassador

Royal Holloway · Part time · Sep 2026 to present

1. Talk with prospective students and their families at open days and campus tours.
2. Meet a wide range of visitors, from sixth form students to parents and teachers, and adapt how I present the university to each of them.

Hall Life Assistant

Royal Holloway · Part time · Sep 2026 to present

1. Support residents across halls of residence, running kitchen meetings and flat meetings to check in on wellbeing and catch problems early.
2. Mediate between flatmates and help sort out everyday problems before they grow.
3. Handle critical incidents and point residents to the right university support, whether that is wellbeing, welfare or something else.

Bar Associate

J D Wetherspoon · Part time · Feb 2026 to present

1. Work bar and floor service at a large three floor pub in Windsor with a team of around 80.
2. Handle customer complaints and resolve issues directly, staying calm and solving problems under pressure.

Alongside the Degree

The work around his studies

He works behind a bar, as a student ambassador and in hall life, and he edits video. He started editing at thirteen and was freelancing by fifteen.

In Figures

His roles in numbers

He leads a committee of ten and works in a three floor pub with a team of around eighty. His research reached 100% coverage against a 90% target on 34 held out real stars.

Threshold

FastAPI · Next.js · SQLite · Groq · Survival Analysis · 2026

Finding out whether a UK employer can sponsor a Skilled Worker visa is slow and mostly guesswork. Threshold pulls live job ads from Reed, Adzuna and company careers pages, checks each employer against the Home Office sponsor register, and ranks them by how long they have held their licence. If you upload a CV, you also get a skill match and an AI review that is checked against what the CV actually says.

1. Every ad checked against 121,199 licensed sponsors
2. Kaplan-Meier and Cox models over ten register snapshots since 2023
3. AI CV review that only counts a claim if the quote is really in the CV
4. 72 recorded API scenarios replayed on every change

RV-ML

Python · PyTorch · scikit-learn · Conformal Prediction · 2026

RV-ML estimates a planet's orbit from its star's radial velocity curve. Its prediction intervals are calibrated on simulated data and still hold on real stars, because the calibration is reweighted for the gap between simulated and real curves.

1. Built on 1,071 RV curves from the NASA Exoplanet Archive
2. 90% intervals cover 93% of held-out simulated stars
3. Covered all 34 held-out real host stars, with no unbounded intervals
4. Noise model fitted to real residuals with a sparse variational GP

Sakha

FastAPI · Gemini · FAISS · Web Speech API · 2026

Sakha is a voice first companion with crisis detection and retrieval over an approved set of verses. It never presents itself as Krishna or as a therapist, and every answer cites the verse it comes from.

1. Crisis detection across four levels with a hard safety gate
2. Retrieval that weighs emotion tags and filters to approved verses
3. Every verse is cited, so none can be made up
4. Safety rules enforced in code rather than in the prompt

Agents of Deception

Python · Ollama · HuggingFace · TransformerLens · FastAPI · Docker · 2026 to 2027

My BSc final year project at Royal Holloway. It has two layers. The first is an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournament in Python, where classic strategies and a local language model agent play each other through one shared interface. The second is Agents of Deception, a house of eight language model agents in the style of The Traitors. Two are secretly told to deceive, and every trust decision between two housemates is a round of the same game. The project asks whether repeated events like betrayal, insults and gossip leave patterns inside the model as well as in what it says. It studies patterns only and makes no claim that the agents have real feelings.

1. A round robin tournament with Tit for Tat, Grim Trigger, Pavlov and a Zero Determinant strategy, plus noise that can flip a move
2. Eight agents, two Traitors and six Faithful, who play, talk in public and private and vote someone out each cycle
3. Two personas, one prosocial and one Machiavellian, matched in length, plus a no persona baseline
4. Probes the model's internal activations to see whether they predict its next move better than its history and messages alone
5. Builds on Curvo (2025) and Sobotka et al. (2026)

AI and ML

11 tools

• Claude API
• Gemini API
• LangChain
• Hugging Face
• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• Fine-tuning
• Conformal Prediction
• pandas
• NumPy
• Matplotlib

Dev

11 tools

• Python
• SQL
• FastAPI
• React
• Spring Boot
• PostgreSQL
• Docker
• Git
• HTML
• CSS
• WordPress

Design

11 tools

• Adobe Illustrator
• Photoshop
• Premiere Pro
• After Effects
• Canva
• CapCut
• Mailchimp
• Hootsuite
• Google Analytics
• Notion
• Microsoft Office

Visual Work

Photoshop · Canva · Premiere Pro

I treated the society's comms and Palmy AI like products, with one visual system across posters, reels, podcast thumbnails and SEO. Instagram grew from 400 to 850 followers and video reach went up 30%.

1. International Society visual identity and event campaigns
2. Palmy AI podcast packaging, trailers and thumbnails
3. Instagram grew from 400 to 850 followers, up 112%
4. Video reach up 30% after full SEO setup

Cultural Fashion Show

Poster · International Society x International Community

A runway night for the society's international community, where students wear their culture and celebrate together. Red curtains and a lit staircase set the stage.

1. 8th October, SU Hall, 6pm to 8pm

Term 1 Wrap

Graphic · RHUL International Society

The society's first term as a scrapbook, with photos from the stall, the stage and the go karting day pinned to a film strip under a yellow folder.

Potluck

Poster · RHUL International Society x International Community

A day of shared food where everyone brings something from home. The illustration is warm and busy on purpose, so it feels like the table it is advertising.

1. 8th October, 9am to 5pm, SU Hall

Movie Night

Poster · International Community x International Society

A film night in a lecture theatre, shown as a script title over an empty screen in a dark room.

1. 10th October, 6 to 8pm, Bourne LT2

Upcoming Events

Programme · September and October

The society's calendar on one sheet, each event in its own colour so the week can be read at a glance.

1. 22nd, Freshers Fair, 9.30am to 5pm, Founders Square
2. 24th, Taster Session, 7pm to 7.50pm, Boilerhouse 007
3. 30th, A Letter to Future Me, 6pm to 8pm
4. 6th, Sip and Paint, 7pm to 9pm

Night of Nations

Poster · International Community x International Society

The society's biggest night, shown as a globe ringed with world landmarks and the crest of each national and cultural society around the edge.

1. 7th October 2025, 10pm, last entry 12am, SU
2. Students £4, guests £6

Rush Rally

Poster · RHUL International Society

A go karting day designed as a race poster, with a chequered flag, a car at speed and the schedule laid out like a timing sheet.

1. TeamSport Go Karting Reading, 26th November 2025
2. Only 28 spots available

Get Rich with A.I

Video thumbnail

A thumbnail for a video on making money with AI, with a robot in a bowler hat, banknotes in the air and the title in glowing blue.

1. One of the 150+ videos edited end to end across two YouTube channels

Escape This

Video thumbnail

A thumbnail built as one diagram, a crowd of figures under a bell curve and one red figure standing apart from them.

1. One of the 150+ videos edited end to end across two YouTube channels

Interviewing Brown Marlon

Video thumbnail

A thumbnail for an interview, with two people facing each other at studio microphones and the guest's name on a yellow label.

1. One of the 150+ videos edited end to end across two YouTube channels

The Untold Story

Video thumbnail

A thumbnail for a personal story, with one face broken up into torn paper and colour and the title across the top.

1. One of the 150+ videos edited end to end across two YouTube channels

Insanity?

Video thumbnail

A thumbnail made to stop people scrolling, with three famous faces, coloured bars over their eyes and a one word question in yellow.

1. One of the 150+ videos edited end to end across two YouTube channels

4+ Pages and Channels

Run in past roles · from the marketing portfolio

Four or more pages and channels he has run in past roles, across a student society, a podcast company and two YouTube channels.

5,000+ Followers

A page he ran · Palmy AI

A page he ran for Palmy AI, grown past five thousand followers.

150+ Videos

Edited end to end · two YouTube channels

More than 150 videos edited from raw footage to upload across two YouTube channels, including thumbnails and titles.

50+ Students Weekly

Campus Ambassador · Higherin · Feb 2026 to May 2026

As a campus ambassador for Higherin, the UK's leading student careers platform, he represented it at Royal Holloway as part of a national network of more than 1,500 ambassadors. He ran campus campaigns, in person and online, that reached fifty or more students every week.

One Visual System

Instagram, 400 to 850 followers

The International Society's posters, reels and thumbnails were designed as one system, so everything it posted looked like the same society. Its Instagram grew from 400 to 850 followers over that time.

The International Society

Visual identity and event campaigns

One identity for a student society, carried across every poster, campaign and post, from the Night of Nations to the Rush Rally.

The Visual Work

Posters, thumbnails and an identity

He treated the society's comms and Palmy AI like products, with one visual system across posters, reels, podcast thumbnails and SEO. This wall shows seven posters from the International Society and five thumbnails from videos he edited.

By the Numbers

From the marketing portfolio

Four or more pages and channels run in past roles. One page grown past 5,000 followers. More than 150 videos edited end to end across two YouTube channels. Fifty or more students reached every week as a Higherin campus ambassador. The International Society's Instagram went from 400 to 850 followers.

Contact

If you'd like to get in touch, email me or message me on LinkedIn. I always reply.

Resume

AI Engineer in Training at Royal Holloway · Egham, UK

Final year computer science student at Royal Holloway, focused on AI. I left a small town in Pakistan to study in the UK, and now spend most of my time building RAG systems, agent harnesses and fine-tuned models. I'm good with people too, and I genuinely enjoy writing SQL.